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severely for inward sins,-as it is said of some one, that he thought himself a hell-deserving sinner, because he had been made vain by praise of his poetry,-on such persons we need not urge that no wickedness is sin against God, as some would tell us; but it suffices to insist that a just and wise God, cannot be less kind and discriminating than an ordinary good man. It is only when a monstrously erroneous idea of the Divine Character has been enshrined and glorified in a false theory of religion, that a morbid exaggeration of the sinfulness of every frailty is at all to be feared. Undoubtedly with the vast majority of mankind the very opposite is the danger; we excuse and make light of our frailties, faults, or vices; nay, even of our injustices.

Thus far, it has been shown that, if we believe in a God who has ordained nature,-if we further believe that the true and legitimate precepts of morals inhere in human nature itself, and are coeval with man in man's world; it follows, that every wilful commission of immorality is an offence against the laws of human nature, and therefore, against the God of nature. This last step, though, I think, necessitated by sound reasoning, is more than a verbal difference. To offend against a blind and pitiless Nature, as against winds and waves, may be a grievous folly; but the sense of our wrongfulness is then in kind different, from the sense that we have sinned against a loving and wise God. Conflict with brute force is one thing, contact of spirit with spirit is another. The sense that we are struggling against iron laws of necessity may paralyze us with despair or may sober us into prudential evasion, but never softens and melts the heart. Faith that God is good and wise, makes His ordinances sacred, puts us to shame and calls out our self-condemnation, if we have violated them; in short, converts our wills to the side of righteousness. "The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul." I do not deny, that even without any sense of a holy God, morals may become spiritual. When a man not only acts justly and mercifully, but delights in justice and mercy, and is attracted to love just and merciful men for their very virtue, and hates injustice and cruelty for their own sake; his love, his joy, his hatred, are spiritual, even though his theories may be, or seem to us, atheistic. But a spiritual faith, which discerns a holy God, who sympathizes with the spirit of man when it strives after harmony with His wise enactments, certainly gives a great aid to moral aspiration, and ought to issue in a more complete and loving obedience. Herein lies the true glory and strength of Christianity, the strength which has upheld

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it, in spite of countless fables and mischievous falsehoods encumbering and marring it. Apostle differs from Apostle in diverse points, and nearly all add something to Jesus: but all agree in earnest exhortation to practical virtue and inward holiness as the end of faith, even when they couple it with a creed of doubtful disputation. 'Every one that doeth righteousness is born of God;" says John the Elder: "in this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother. He that keepeth God's commandments dwelleth in God, and God in him." Peter also (if Peter it be), says that "God hath called us to glory and virtue," and that "by His great and precious promises the readers of the Epistle have escaped the corruptions of the world and become partakers of the Divine nature. What manner of persons then ought they to be in all holy conduct and godliness; peaceable, spotless, and blameless!" "Pure religion and undefiled before God," says James, "is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and keep oneself unspotted from the world." Also against all spiritual pride and wrath of zeal, or other vices of conceited orthodoxy, James, the earliest of Christian Bishops, is as emphatic as against vulgar vice. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (perhaps Apollos) declares that Holiness is the end for which God trains and chastises His people, and is the condition without which none can see the Lord. Paul is as copious and detailed in practical exhortation as in transcendental dogma, and again and again sets forth, that the very object of Christian faith is "to build up the saints into a holy temple, in which God may dwell by His spirit." To maintain a daily faith that God overlooks our life, claiming of us abstinence from evil, and pointing to right conduct as our noblest and best portion, is certainly of high moral value. And this is really what is meant by accounting moral offence a sin against God. I have said, that this is emphatically set forth by the original Christian teachers; nevertheless, it was not new in Christianity. In the Hebrew Psalms and in parts of the Hebrew prophets, also in the Proverbs, we have manifold expressions of the same sentiment, coupled with avowals of delight in obedience to God's law, and aspiration after higher and nobler virtue, as the best gift which the Most High Himself can bestow. So much I say, in justice to the Hebrew sages and the earlier religion, which Christians are apt unduly to disparage. But there is a topic yet beyond, which I have not yet opened.

If I believe that the Infinite Mind, which is aware of everything everywhere, looks with approval, complacency and sympathy on my efforts to harmonize my conduct and character with His holy will, and on the contrary disapproves my sinful opposition; this belief brings me into direct personal confronting with His serene august presence. Wise and reasonable religion cannot be a mere theory: it must be a life. This is the main point which I would earnestly impress on you. A true faith draws the heart into some form of intercourse with God, even when its utterances are incoherent and undigested intellectually; and whenever such communion is constantly and deliberately sought after, it entails a positive dedication of the soul to God as its reasonable and happy service. To live in conformity to nature, was the aspiration of the noble Stoic; to live in conscious harmony with God, is an aspiration still more blessed. The conscience becomes tenderer by all such inward devotion. It is felt as a wretched and an odious thing to be the slave of any evil habit, or any ungoverned passion, or of ignoble frivolity or indolence; and equally so, to be guilty of selfishness, which is generally unjust. Small frailties, once unnoticed, soon stand out in glaring light, and are now accounted vices which we are bound to subdue; thus the aspiration of the soul has a loftier standard than before. This is the commencement of a higher inward life, in which the person becomes conscious that he properly belongs to God. In Paul's emphatic language, "None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord, and whether we die, we die unto the Lord. Whether we live therefore or die, we are the Lord's." We may be quite sure, that no soul of man ever went through that stage of sentiment, without holy joy and unspeakable content. Out of this springs a new sense of ingratitude quite unendurable, if, overcome by baser attractions, we again permit ourselves to live by a lower standard,-say, that of a majority of the less scrupulous and worse taught. More than ever then do we necessarily judge, that to act wrongfully is, in us, to sin against God, and grieve His Holy Spirit within our hearts. For to have faith in a pure and loving God, makes us love the contemplation of Him and rejoice in His conscious company. What an honour is that! how great a joy! What more base than to sacrifice it for some worldly gratification! Therefore, it is no longer some great iniquity, no longer that only which the world will call wickedness, that we feel constrained to pronounce "sin

against God," but everything which, we are conscious, puts a cloud between us and Him, everything that impedes the approach of the heart as of a simple child to a glorious and loving Father. You come, I suppose, Sunday by Sunday, to church. You mean to be religious. Dear friends, raise your aspirations high, and expect more and more from pure and undefiled religion. In the antiquated phrase of the Old Testament I may say, Open thy mouth wide and God will fill it. "Lift up your hearts!" says the minister to the people in the Anglican Liturgy. The people reply, "We lift them up to the Lord." Let this be your reply also. Be not satisfied with a routine of presenting your body here or elsewhere as on a sacred day. Let all days be sacred to you. Since each of you is a spiritual being, endowed with a capacity of perceiving and partially knowing God, claim your high privilege; act and live in an abiding sense that you belong to God and are in the noblest sense His. Cultivate conscientiousness diligently; be truthful with yourselves. "Who can understand his errors?" says the Hebrew Psalmist: "cleanse thou me from secret faults. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be alway acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer." Living in this spirit, you will need no priesthood to dictate religious creeds to you. Wisdom of heart will increase, enabling you to discriminate wheat from chaff in miscellaneous teaching, writing and talk. Moral truth has ever abounded in cultivated nations; but the admixture of error, and follies called sacred, have ever been the embarrassment to learners. For the discrimination we do not need scholastic erudition or materialistic science, but pure foundations of moral sentiment, and the earnest striving of the heart after a noble life. "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled." They who seek to be alive in the Spirit will learn to walk in the Spirit. And the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, and every form of virtue. The schisms and wranglings which from the days of Paul to the present moment have been the disgrace and the weakness of Christianity will gradually vanish, in proportion as all cherish practical righteousness as the end for which God has ordained us.

HUNGER AND THIRST AFTER

RIGHTEOUSNESS.

[1876.]

"Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled."

AFTER what do men naturally and even necessarily hunger

and thirst? The question may seem to answer itself. We hunger after food; we thirst for refreshing drink. In a wider sense we hunger after all bodily needs, as clothing and shelter, and repose after toil. The first necessities of man are those of the animal; and when these are satisfied, there is in our nature a universal craving for something of ornament, something of beauty, superadded to the supplies that are indispensable. One who begins to adorn his house or his apartment manifests that he is not quite miserable. He is lifted one stage above the desires fundamental to animal life into a region of mental desire. His idea of beauty may be childish and far from noble, yet he is elevated at least a little by it, and, it would seem, he rises hereby above other animals. It is a first distinction, yet only the beginning of a long and apparently endless series by which mankind is destined to ascend higher and higher. Our hunger and thirst become transferred into other and still nobler aims.

The professed students of animated nature are of late inculcating the doctrine, that mankind has been born out of primitive brute races. Undoubtedly our origin is a mystery: its research may be an ingenious theory: nevertheless, a practical fact meets us, clear, strong, and certain,-that the gap between man and the highest brute is vast. Subtlety is wasted in trying to explain it away. It is said that the elephant and the dog reason. Be it so: but no one sees in them any discernment of God or of a superior spirit or of any supersensible existence. Man has been called the sole priest of God on earth, because none besides him worships the Unseen. Side by side with this fact stands another closely akin. None but he forms any ideal of moral conduct: none strives upward towards a life nobler than that of sense: no

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